According the sixteenth Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2021 released online on Wednesday, enrollment in government schools in Manipur has decreased from 26.8% in 2018 to 13.4% in 2021
TFM Desk
Despite Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh’s ‘School Fagat-Hansi’ mission giving renewed thrust towards the improvement of government schools both in terms of physical and manpower infrastructure, Manipur has witnessed sharp decline of children enrolment in government schools from 26.8% in 2018 to 13.4% in 2021, said the sixteenth Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2021 released online on Wednesday.
In contrast, there is an increase in the proportion of children enrolled in government schools between 2018 and 2020 at the national level. For children in the age group of 6-14, enrollment in government schools has increased from 64.3% in 2018 to 70.3% in 2021, said the report.
The national increase in government school enrollment is driven by large northern states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana and southern states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, it added.
According to ASER 2021, there has been a clear shift from private to government schools at an all-India level. For children in the age group of 6-14, enrollment in private schools has decreased from 32.5% in 2018 to 24.4% in 2021.
However, in Nagaland and Manipur where government school enrollment fell by more than 11 percentage points, the shift has not been to private schools but rather is reflected in much larger numbers of currently not enrolled children in these states.
The report also pointed out that Manipur saw a slight increase on children taking paid private tuition classes to supplement their education from 46.2% in 2018 to 49.1% in 2021.
As per the ASER2021, Manipur registered a huge jump in households’ access to smartphones from 53.4% in 2018 to 92.9% in 2021. Of this, 35.6% of children can access smartphones at all times for their studies, while 39.9% can access sometimes and 24.5% do not have access to the smartphone for studies.
In Manipur as well, 94.3% of all enrolled children have textbooks for their current grade, said the report.
ASER 2021 was released at an online event. This is the sixteenth annual report.
Every year from 2005 to 2014, and then every alternate year till 2018, ASER has reported on the schooling status of children in the 5-16 age group across rural India and their ability to do basic reading and arithmetic tasks.
According to a press statement, last year, COVID-19 interrupted this trajectory, along with so much else. But with schools being closed since March 2020, understanding the effect of the pandemic on schools, families and children was crucial. To address the need for large-scale nationally representative data on the impact of the pandemic on children’s education, in 2020, ASER developed an entirely new design, consisting of a phone-based survey that explored children’s access to learning opportunities, it said.
The statement further said, with the pandemic extending into yet another year, field-based survey operations were still not possible on a national scale. As a consequence, ASER 2021 followed the same format of a phone-based survey. Conducted in September-October 2021, eighteen months after the first lockdown, the survey explores how children in the age group of 5-16 studied at home since the onset of the pandemic and the challenges that the schools and households now face as schools reopen across states, it added.
ASER 2021 was conducted in 25 states and 3 Union Territories. It reached a total of 76,706households and 75,234 children in the age group of 5-16 years, as well as teachers or head teachers from 7,299 government schools offering primary grades.
ASER 2021 Manipur coverage:
- 9 districts based on 2011 Census
- 257 Sample village
- 1191 Survey households
- 1762 children (age 5 to 16 reached)